Papa The Great Review

Surprise, surprise! Papa The Great has been released. With Krishan Kumar busy fixing things that he knows nothing about, one believed that his latest - and hopefully last - venture would never see the light of the day. It's not one of those pleasant surprises, though, and this fiasco is something that Kumar won't be able to 'fix' for his life.

Everyone involved with this movie appears to have been raised from the dead - with the honorable exception of Gulshan Kumar. Nagma and the director, K Bhagyaraj, were thought to have moved on to other things and places - nobody knows which ones. The kind of product that PTG is, they are bound to go back to whatever they were doing.

The premise for the story actually had some potential, but the way that it has been handled and enacted, finding it would be next to impossible. Jai Prakash (Krishan Kumar), an engineer, is a coward who camouflages the fact by bragging about his fictitious heroics to his son (Master Bobby). This he does to prevent his son from becoming like him. Jai's cowardice has its genesis in the murder of his father by a gangster. His wife (Nagma) goes through a lot of pain in putting up with his phobias.

But, as the saying goes, too much is too bad. Jai meets his nemesis in the form of the same gangster Raka (Satya Prakash) who killed his father (this fact is never touched upon, perhaps because the guy looks as young as he was those many years ago). After a lot of hide and seek, and some able support from a Bihari Babu (Shatrughan Sinha), Jai conquers his timidity.

At two and a half hours, sitting through the movie is an onerous task. At one point, just as it appears that we have reached the end, Sinha proclaims,"Bihari Babu ki jaan itni aasani se nahi jaa sakat hai." That is enough for you to either pull you hair out or leave the theater.

The whole affair is so preposterous - heads rotating, bouncing and springing - that you might be deluded into believing that you are watching a cartoon. Actually, it's much more childish than that. Most of the gags are such that we end up laughing, not at the happenings, but at the guys who conceived them.

Krishan Kumar's painstaking effort in delivering his dialogues, as at emoting, is so obvious that more than him, we are grateful that we won't be seeing him again. Towards the end, the audience becomes so accustomed to his pussy ways that when he actually takes on the goons, he brings the house down in disbelief.

Of the cast, only Master Bobby seemed to have any illusions of the movie's success. Only that can account for his overflowing enthusiasm. Shatru is jarring in the extreme. Nagma exudes a lot of ineffectual charm. Both she and K Bhagyaraj would be well served back south.

Talking about Bhagyaraj, what made him do this film? Has he run out of admirers that he latched on to a banner that is known to deliver duds? Whatever it is, he better hope that his fans don't take this to be the beginning of an irreversible slide.

All said and done, PTG isn't a movie that you would be proud telling your dad of having watched. For all you know, your movie allowance could be revoked.